He Wasn't Performing. He Was Pouring.

I performed energy at a feature launch once. The release was an enhancement at best. The product underneath was on its last breath, and everyone in the meeting room knew it, including me. So I cranked up my own voice. I leaned in harder. I delivered the talk track like the thing was bigger than it was, because somebody had to fill the room with something, and I thought volume might pass for momentum.

It didn’t. People can smell manufactured momentum the same way they can smell a steak that’s been microwaved.

A few weeks later, I sat at a bar and watched a beertender work the rail.

He was not chipper, not bubbly, not asking anyone how their day was in the tone of a children’s television host. He was also not phoning it in. He was just there. When a guy three stools down said something quiet about his week being long, he heard it. When a woman ordered a sour, he nodded and made it without making a moment out of it. When someone asked what was new on tap, he answered the question. Not the question he wished they had asked. The actual one.

He listened. He didn’t perform listening, which is the part that has been bothering me ever since.

There is a kind of engagement that is real. It looks like attention. It sounds like attention. It is, in fact, attention. And there is a kind of engagement that is theater, and the theater version has won most of the territory in modern business because we measure smiles, response times, exclamation points, and the energy in the room, and we mistake those signals for the thing they are supposed to be signaling.

Most service training pushes people toward the theater. Most hiring pushes them there too. We interview for warmth, eye contact, the firm handshake, the prepared question about the company. We are choosing, mostly, for people who can perform being interested. We rarely interview for whether they can actually be interested.

When you hire performers, you get a team that knows how to project energy when there is none. They are very good at the launch where the product is just an enhancement. They are very good at the all-hands where the quarter was rough. They are very good at the customer call where the renewal is shaky. They look great. They sound great. And they cost you the one thing real engagement gives you, which is the ability to notice that something is wrong before it gets loud.

The performer fills the room. The present person hears it before it gets loud.

If you want a team that can catch a product before it dies, you need fewer people who can sell foam and more people who can pull a clean pint. They are quieter in the interview. They will not look like the obvious hire. They will not high-five your CEO at the offsite. They will be the ones who notice that the customer is hesitating, that the engineer is exhausted, that the launch is thinner than the deck claims.

I think about him sometimes. Not because he was extraordinary in a way that you would write a LinkedIn post about. The opposite. Because he was completely ordinary in the rarest possible way. He was doing his job, with all of his attention turned on, and no part of it turned outward as a show.

The product I was cranking energy for did die, by the way. Not because of the launch. The launch was a symptom. We had been performing for it for a long time before we admitted it was sick.

Stay Positive & Pull A Clean Pint